Though she did like a good pizza those times she went into town.
“How long until we reach the destination?” The man behind her spoke for the first time. His perfect English alerted her to the fact that it may not be his first language. Not that it mattered.
“An hour to go,” her father answered.
The man didn’t respond with more, and Cora felt a sort of relief sweep over her. She’d been working in Hutton Tours long enough to read people, and she didn’t like the crawling feeling on her spine each time she thought of his very cold black eyes.
Eyes seen in an animal, and not a cute little puppy dog either.
She suppressed a chill sneaking over her, and focused on the instruments. All appeared to be shipshape. The next hour she spent evaluating winds and keeping a close eye on the weather system. She did not wish to wait out a storm with Ron Smith, if that was really his name.
She also checked on her father, which she often did in flight. Checking that he appeared comfortable and maintained focus.
When they began to near the destination, she noted the thick snow already on the ground here, and the pond would have just as much snow on the thick ice. They were taking chances by flying this late in the season in Alaska, but after the request for a flight came in, her father decided they could make one more run.
She shifted in her seat, blinking at the white of the snow below, blinding despite her sunglasses. God, she loved this land. Every day she woke knowing the day would bring a new adventure—
A click next to her ear jerked her head around.
Her father did the same, and their eyes met over the gun their passenger held in their peripheral.
“Change of plans. We’ll be landing at these coordinates.” He recited the coordinates. Ron Smith’s perfectly spoken words shot terror down Cora’s spine.
“That’s thirty miles more, directly into the storm.” On the first word, her voice started off as a wobble, and by the last, she’d steeled herself, girded her loins and pulled up her big girl panties all in a split second.
“You’ll land where I tell you to land, or I’ll take control of the plane myself.”
Her father, diplomatic as ever when it came to customer service, also was no pushover. He was a hard-nosed military man who’d been living in the bush for more than twenty years, and he wouldn’t take shit off anybody.
“You’re going to put that gun away and let me do what’s best for all of us,” her father said evenly. She saw the telltale flicker of a tendon in the crease of his jaw, something only displayed when her father got angry.
“I’m going to tell you one more time—land at those coordinates.”
Cora didn’t often feel afraid. She could count a handful of times in her life when she didn’t know what to expect next, and this was one of them.
“Look, we can’t fly that far west without real danger. The storm is coming from the west, and we’ll be lucky to get in and get home before—”
Hard steel slammed against her cheek. Pain blasted through her. Stunned by pain and a fog of fear, she could only bring a hand to the place where Ron Smith slammed the pistol into her face.
“Just a damn minute!” Her father’s shout echoed in her skull. “Nobody strikes my daughter. If you don’t put that weapon away, you’re going to find yourself in the bottom of a ravine for the bears to eat come spring.”
Some of Cora’s wits returned. She put a hand on her father’s arm, tense and seeming to vibrate with power under her fingers.
Talking sense to the guy was out of the question. Clearly, he had a rendezvous point that had changed, and when she saw the satellite phone in his other hand, she understood he’d received a text message.
Her instincts about the guy were right from the beginning—he was a criminal, possibly one of the many traffickers they heard about on the news running through the state, carting drugs from Russia through Alaska to distribute to the lower forty-eight—cocaine or meth or even yaba, meth in tablet form manufactured in Southeast Asia.
She glanced at his duffel, thinking she should have asked to search it. But in these parts, finding a gun in someone’s luggage was the norm.
Fighting to reason a way out of this, she nodded to her father. “Maybe we can accommodate him if we fly around the storm.”
Her father started shaking his head, but Ron Smith spoke. “I need to arrive by one p.m. to make my meeting.”
“Look here, thirty miles west puts us all in serious danger. If we go down in the storm in that area, we won’t have much of a chance of being found let alone getting out. It’s rough terrain—mountains, hidden ice caves. You’re not going to just walk—”
He struck her father across the face with the pistol. Cora screamed and had no memory of unlatching her seatbelt to dive in front of her father. The plane dipped as her father’s hands went slack from the blow. Seeing things could get out of hand fast, she grabbed the controls.
“You son of a bitch,” her father ground out. He shoved Cora into her seat and took over again. She had a feeling her father would not back down from this fight. Some fights a man couldn’t walk away from.
“Dad, let’s figure this out. Can we get him there by one o’clock?” She stared at her father’s handsome and aging face, the straight nose like her own and the bruise rising on his cheek just like her own. They shared coloring too—blue eyes that tended to appear gray in certain lights or brighter blue if they wore blue shirts. And her blondish brown hair did not yet have the streaks of silver gray his did.
That rising bruise on her father’s cheek broke her heart. It made her want to grab the man’s gun and shoot him through the heart, and then toss him out of the plane for the bears as her father had said.
Her father gave her a side-eye look. One that froze her more than anything had yet, because she knew the man was about to pull an act of heroics.
“Dad—” She didn’t get the words out of her mouth before her father unbuckled and launched himself at Ron Smith. The plane dipped, and she had no choice but to take over at the controls while they struggled for the weapon in the small space behind her.
She hardly got the plane leveled out before something hard struck her in the temple. Her fingers went lax on the controls first, and then her arms dropped from her slumping shoulders. She felt each part of her body shut down one by one until she knew without a doubt that they were going down.
In the wilderness.
With a storm coming.
She could only hope none of them would survive.
Chapter Two
Cora woke with pain shooting up her spine and into her skull. Her first thought was she couldn’t be paralyzed or else she wouldn’t feel pain. But that didn’t make the realization better.
She lay crumpled over the controls, her face pressed against the cracked windshield after being launched from her seat. Icy air rushed through the plane from an open door.
All at once, the events returned to her, smacking her brain like a freight train hitting a stationary object on the tracks.
“Dad!” Heedless of her injuries, if she had any, she scrambled to get up, to find which direction was up, and turn herself around to see her father lay on his side on the floor of the plane. One wing jutted into the air higher than the other, telling her they’d landed on uneven terrain or possibly even on the side of a mountain.